Your Logic Does Not at All Resemble Our Earth Logic

[scioscribe]

I'm trying to think of some of the most banally baffling lines I've come across in fiction, lines where the component parts are all seemingly normal but just come together in a way that makes you think you and the author live on different planets.

My all-time favorite is "Rats scurried over his hands and face, but he ignored them." No, he didn't. Not in my world, buddy. Maybe if he were a professional stuntman or rat trainer, but otherwise, I don't care how stressed you are, you're paying at least a little bit of attention to rats crawling across your face.

What made me think of this was recently encountering "Cops go through girlfriends like veal cutlets." My attention was immediately derailed by trying to figure out how many veal cutlets these people are going through. More than I am, presumably. I desperately needed follow-up on this, maybe with a series of thinkpiece articles. Veal Parmesan: Surprising Popular with Cops?

EDIT: Rachel reminded me of another gem: "...I, who had refused for years to let the husband in Paris realize his lifelong dream of photographing a scorpion in my vagina."

Comments

[sholio]

HAHAHA (and also, what).

This is not quite the same thing, but it makes me think of my bafflement at Robert Sawyer making a point in his Neanderthal AU books (Earth accidentally opens a portal to an AU Earth where Neanderthals, not regular Homo sapiens, is the dominant intelligent species) that Neanderthal hair naturally parts in the middle and this is one of the key defining features that can be used to tell them apart from regular humans, since human hair doesn't do that. It's mentioned in several different scenes and people find it odd and unusual, as if center-parted hair has never been seen on Earth before, and every single time I was thinking "... Sawyer, have you ever. seen. an actual human being."

[rachelmanija]

WHAAAAAAT?

[sholio]

To be fair, there was a lot of WTFery in those books, but that was probably the thing that stood out in my mind as the most utterly bizarre failure of basic observation skills.

[scioscribe]

Wasn't that also the one where the society's solution to rape was to castrate not only the rapists but also any male descendants of the rapists?

[sholio]

I don't remember the male descendants part, but I do remember that the castration was accomplished by biting the dude's junk off.

[scioscribe]

Huh. I... guess I might be a Neanderthal, then? I'm going to go examine my brow in the mirror.

That is terrible on such a beautiful level.

[sholio]

SAME. *fistbump of Neanderthal solidarity*

[rachelmanija]

I carefully brush my hair to proclaim my status as a Homo sapiens!

[scioscribe]

I now need a YA dystopian trilogy about teenagers obsessed with concealing their Neanderthal status by worrying about their hair all the time.